Author: Sally Barker

I now live in Hebden Bridge with my partner and 2 children(15 and 11), having just moved back from London where I lived for 22 years. My work explores relationships between us and our environment, particularly the landscape: the mutual shaping, nurturing, destructive and creative forces. I use aspects of the landscape and its materials to mirror emotional and psychological states. My work shifts a lot- I grow plants through sculpture, split stone, embed & bury things, stuff, stitch,spin wool, melt ice, construct delicate towers with grass and bolt together heavy pieces of stone. Very often techniques and processes, manipulating materials and the acts involved in the making are as important as the resulting work.
Most recently I have brought the female body into my work, casting my breasts in latex – something I did many years ago with Jelly Tits and Nipple Flowers and am now re-visiting. So my work is a statement on being a woman and a mother now- post breast feeding, my children older, myself older, the ageing, the frustrations, the fluctuating pain and joy that is our unraveling relationship with our children – it’s all moulded, cast, cut, balanced, hung, sewn, drilled and stitched into the materials of the landscape.

The Burr Here are some new ideas I have been working on, based around a tree that looks extremely pregnant. These quick drawings in photoshop may become real, temporary interventions and consequently photographs, or they may remain simply as ideas. … Continued

My new work comes directly from my experience as a mother – I have been deliberately looking at ways of mirroring the evolving and turbulent time as the teenage child and parent struggle to be together and be apart, and to … Continued